Meetings

We either love them or we hate them but mostly we hate them.  Why? Because most of them are badly organised and lack purpose.  How many times have we heard someone droning on about something they’ve done of no interest to us, seemingly to torture us? The fact is; people these days are deluged with information, and so have become quite selective about what they listen to. If the information is perceived as having no relevancy to the individual, then it will be filtered out. People have to see “what’s in it for them”. So let’s look some types of meetings people attend. By the way these could be work meetings, hobby groups or church committee meetings (some of the examples following may not be appropriate for individual circumstances). “Information” Meetings These meetings are frequently held by “management” and are frequently unpopular as they reinforce the notion that management is the “all-knowing wise master”. It seems to me that any meeting where giving feedback and asking questions is difficult or discouraged (“information” meetings) should be done in some other way, or risk the disengagement of the audience. So if you are organising this kind of meeting try to make feedback and questions possible. For example instead of one big meeting, a number of smaller meetings could be set up with the convenors of these small meetings sent notes and “feedback forms” to pass on difficult questions to management.

 “Showing off” Meetings

These are meetings called by an individual because they can, which seeks no feedback at all. These meetings should not be called. That person should instead send an email if necessary.

What meetings are really for

Meetings are held for giving and receiving information and feedback, deciding on actions and negotiating, assigning and accepting responsibility and recording issues completed.

 For example if management wants to implement a new project, they need the key stakeholders, such as lower management, to buy in on the project, give their ideas, offer feedback and negotiate/accept responsibility.

 All participants in a meeting should have a valid reason for being there, that is they should be ‘stakeholders’.  Lower level employees may be required to provide something of specific value, such as the “view from the production line”. That person should be one of the better employees with a willingness to give of their experience to help improve processes and the company (and themselves). If that person cannot handle being in the meeting, then get someone better.  On the other hand there is no point in negotiating responsibility with someone for something that is just a routine part of his or her job.

 What can go wrong

Let’s say management wants to implement a project. It nominates a convenor and some discussion points. Stakeholders are invited and the meeting is held. Discussion on the key points occurs, relevant issues are raised by stakeholders which are included in decisions and responsibilities and due dates are assigned.

 Now what can happen is that at the follow up meeting two weeks or a month later, the convenor asks for feedback on progress, but is met by stony silence, or worse still, finds no-one actually attending the meeting.  What went wrong?

Well one thing might have been that the convenor did not provide meeting minutes within a day or two after the meeting to remind everyone of their responsibilities and due dates. Or he failed to remind everyone to attend just before the meeting.

 Difficulties of Managing Meetings

Looking at the actual process involved in running a meeting it involves:-

<> drafting agenda,

<> taking minutes in the meeting, noting completed issues, actions on existing issues, new issues

<> creating the minutes file from the amended agenda file.

Running successful meetings is clearly a daunting task and the convenor must be very organised. Difficulties include:-

<> s/he has to create at least two files per meeting, agenda and minutes.

<> after several meetings there are many separate files. There may be outstanding items from any of the previous meetings, which can be easily lost.

<> unclosed issues raised in a meeting can be easily overlooked at later meetings without review of all previous minutes, cutting and pasting items from minutes into new agendas. 

<> no easy way of searching these files for information such as 'How many actions does Joe have?'.

<> There is no easy way of categorising different types of issues without repetitious cutting and pasting of data.

<> There is no easy way of separating and categorising different types of events and meetings.

 Meetings as a process – PDCA Cycle

In fact it is much more useful to see meetings as a review process, described in ISO 9001 Quality standard as “review (of) the organization's quality management system at planned intervals, to ensure its continuing suitability, adequacy and effectiveness”. Management review can be applied to any aspect of the organisation that management sees fit.

A specific change control or continuous improvement process is described in the ISO 9001 Quality standard called the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle.

Clearly continuous improvement is a continuous process that often involves several rounds of the improvement cycle for individual items. Therefore in a continuously improving quality system all actions and the impacts of all actions are monitored, reviewed and improved based on objective evidence.

 How to incorporate these ideas in a workable meeting process

To implement a continuous improvement system a specialised database has been developed in Microsoft Access.

In this database there is no need to maintain separate agenda and minutes; there is no cutting and pasting data, everything is handled in only one file, with each issue occupying one line of the database. Information is entered by means of simple electronic entry forms. Information is retrieved by means of reports that filter the data in required (and customisable) ways.

There are two main reports, ‘Unclosed Issues’ and ‘Closed Issues’ which take the place of ‘Agenda’ and ‘Minutes’.

Any issue that is not closed (the 'Issue closed (signature)' field in the Entry Form left blank) will always appear in the ‘Unclosed Issue’ report.

Issues closed at one meeting appear one more time at the next meeting before dropping off the ‘Closed Issues’ report in the following meeting.

This means that the meeting process involves reviewing previous meeting closed issues, tackling any unclosed issues, then raising and dealing, if possible, with new issues.

Note: The database never loses any data. It is always available for later review. All issues that are raised remain in the database as separate lines. They are available for searching at any time later filtered by meeting type, person responsible or issue type.

Meetings are categorised by type, meaning that the same database can be used for a number of different types of meetings. Or just copy the file to start two separate databases for separate meetings.

Variations of this review process have been developed for

1)      To do lists,

2)      Project management,

3)      Audit,

4)      Nonconformance,

5)      Incidents and Injury management

 Contact Integrated Management Systems intms@aapt.net.au for more information about Access databases for exception reporting systems.